


You're a sick bastard

by sempay



Category: Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-24
Updated: 2015-10-24
Packaged: 2018-04-27 20:44:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5063461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sempay/pseuds/sempay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lo watches movies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're a sick bastard

 

Lo watches movies. Moo- _vees_ , she says, with that disgustingly emphasized drawl she knows her dad can’t stand. Her dad is European. Her dad says things like, _Dah-loh-ris, Dah-loh-ris. Gohtuh skuhl, Dah-loh-ris._ And he says things to her in French, too, but that happens mostly during those lucid hours in between bedtime and morning coffee. Things he probably doesn’t even know he’s saying, punctuating the spitty foreign phrases with his damned _Lo_ ’s and _Loh-lihta_ ’s _._

Good _grief_. She’s sick of Lolita.

She’s not Lolita. She’s Dolores Haze to her teachers, Lo to her friends. Dolly when she is wanted for something. She doesn’t admit to being Lolita, because Lolita is another girl entirely.

Here, she’s got it all figured out: starting at seven AM, she is Dolores, slipping on her uniform and tromping obediently to class. When she’s called on to answer questions that she doesn’t know the answer to, she is Dolores. With her socks on, she is Dolores. With her nice braids and ribbons and flesh-colored lips, she is Dolores. She heads to the theater with some prompts in her hand, looking studious and sibilant. Red lipstick and tugged-at braids. Then she becomes Dolly: Quilty embracing her tightly—too tight—and whispering some obscure script in her ear. Dolly desperately wants to impress him. Dolly drinks in the paradox, and smiles up at him; maybe, hopefully, it’s not obvious that she loves him. Dolly shuffles out of the theater, not remembering what exactly she’d done all day but her words to Quilty still singing, stinging, on her tongue.

But in her natural habitat, she is Lo—riding bikes and drinking milkshakes and doing things with the boys; a girl of thirteen. They all meet up after school, and she pushes the thought of an angry Humbert ( _why_ must you be so conventional, Lo?) out of her mind long enough to have fun and play games and wear lipstick and slap away blood-starved mosquitos at sunset. This is the time when she doesn’t think of anyone, not her father or her mother or Clare Quilty. Not her teachers. Just her friends, herself, getting mud in her britches and makeup on her teeth. Money to buy a lollipop from men on the street—who cares what they want, anyway? It’s free candy.

But then, those movee words echo in her mind, amongst all the swears and the dirty things that Humbert doesn’t like her to know: _you’re a sick bastard._

Even as she’s crunching sugar shards in her mouth, she can’t shake the thought. The candy-men are sick bastards. Like the lady on the screen said to her lover, with her palm stinging red. Red lollipop, red lips, red shame-faced cheek.

_You’re all sick bastards._

Then, comes nine PM. She is safely—more or less—at home, and she must get undressed. She must put on a nightgown and let her father administer bandaids to half-scabbed scrapes she’d acquired during the day. 

It’s really only a formality. It is, she suspects, his version of what kids call _petting,_ and she’s rather tired of it by the time he’s done kissing the imaginary bruises on her thighs. This is the beginning of her transformation into Lolita. This is when Lo slings a bindlestiff over her skinny shoulders and hikes it out of there. She hops on the next train to Chicago, or New York, or wherever nice, handsome men still exist and give you candy without any damn ulterior motives.

Lolita swallows a sigh and slides her legs around Humbert Humbert’s hips, letting him hoist her into the air and carry her to bed. He is her dad, after all.

Lo would’ve punched him.

Lolita is a passive force; she is the seashore under tidal assault. Somehow, her nightie betrays her, and ends up crumpled uselessly at the foot of the bed. Her hands are drawn to the hands of another, much larger and sweatier than hers. Her toes curl up, the mattress groans. She makes sure that she can’t be held responsible for anything except for her own private thoughts. Her body sasses him a little bit, but she knows it’s mostly futile, so her spine contends to bend under the weight of someone whose French dribbles down her chin like dogspit on a hot summer’s day.

_You’re a sick bastard._

Lolita doesn’t know what he writes in that journal of his, but it’s probably nothing explicit or scandalizing. He probably writes about her, in the same language he uses when he’s distressing or caressing— _ma cherie,_ a mixture of tongues and poetry and literary outbursts of quiet euphoria (Bea, Vee, Annabel).

She doesn’t write. Lo does, but Lo writes about boys _her_ age.

 


End file.
